Ny Name is Shirley

“In America my name is Shirley, but in my tribe I am the only one with the name Green Water”, she said.   

“I use my name when I speak to the Creator, in my own language.”

Dressed in a loin cloth the young boy was chopping wood.  The man in the communal “three fire” tree bark covered hut told stories of his people's historic and contemporary way of life, sitting on animal skins with a quiver full of arrows hanging beside him.  All the sturdy huts are covered with bark.  Outside a couple of fires burn on the edge of the small clearing, in the middle the soil had been prepared and earth mounds waited for corn, pumpkin, squash and potato to be planted.

They are all playacting in this small oasis in the woods, demonstrating the american native way of life, but talking as contemporary native americans.  American Native, or Wampanoag as the leaflets, signs and orientation movie asks us to call them - not Indian; Indians are from India, and definitely do not call them Chief, Squaw and whatever you do, do not say How! There are no feathers, nor tepees.  They answer questions from the tourists almost defensively - American and European.  We are all visitors to this lost world.  You almost feel stupid for asking.  

“Where did the women have their babies?” one visitor asked.  

“Here, of course.  Where did you think?” said Shirley.

(No hospitals, stupid).  

Everyone looked at the dirt floor and animal skins.  “Grandmothers helped; they knew what to do” she added matter of factly.

Outside, the man whose home this represents, Hobbamock, was talking to more visitors.  He is a big man, in a loin cloth and moccasins, so big he gets about in an 'shop mobility' type electric wheel chair.  

We leave this small forest clearing of a lost world, and walk along a wooden board walk, up a small hill and through a wooden gate built into the wooden palisade that surrounds the Pilgrims Plantation village, a historically accurate recreation of the village built at the site of the abandoned Wampanoag village Patuxet.  It was reconstructed to look like it did 7 years after the Mayflower landed and changed everything.